Rippin-Kitten.com: 1 year later
When I started this site a year ago, I really didn’t know what the goal of the site was going to be. Initially I wanted to put the call out to other young, rockin’ biker women (like me!), who maybe were part of Gen X and not quite ready to be a grown up (like me!). And quite honestly, I wasn’t even sure if I could maintain posting consistently week after week (I’d be out riding in the summer and motorcycle news is scarce in the winter months-or so I thought) to make this blog worth reading. It was difficult in the beginning: I would sit in front on my keyboard, staring at the screen wondering what the hell I was going to write about.
But something weird happened: I finally found my groove, my posts started getting attention and I found not only was I enjoying the whole blogging thing, I was “meeting” a lot of other my fellow biker bloggers and people who were becoming regular readers and I was also getting great blog reviews and awards from my blogging peers.
I didn’t really know the first thing about blogging. I’d kept a personal journal but a motorcycle blog is different. How would I find people to read my blog and who would care anyway? Through some cool blog communities like BlogCatalog I met a bunch of people and learned lots of things about writing a blog. And through social networking sites like myspace and BikerWorlds I found other bikers who are interested in the same things I am.
Traffic started increasing, people were linking to the site and honestly the highlight for me last year was when Greg White and Kawasaki asked me to test ride a Vulcan 900 Custom. I mean, who the hell was I? Just some biker girl from MA who happened to start a blog a few months before…
In one year, I’ve gone from a few readers a week to tens of thousands of page views. I’m not going to make any grand claims like you see on other blogs, but I will tell you that I’m happy to see my google page rank on the rise (link to me!), my Alexa rank continues to move up and the number of people who view the site goes up almost every week. Fellow bikers in 114 different countries have checked in on the rippin-kitten.com blog. And I’ve been getting inquiries from major companies regarding advertising opportunities. Not too shabby.
Anyway, enough of boring blog stats and me marveling at my own success. Stay tuned later this week as I roll-out a new feature for Rippin-Kitten.com and share some other things that I’ve been working on.
Thanks to everyone for making my first year of blogging a great one. It’s been a great learning experience and I’ve enjoyed our many discussions. Looking forward to another year!
